Storing things

When I was a kid, and had far, far more time on my hands (not that I would have seen it that way at the time), my comics were in order.

No, wait. When I was a kid, they were in random boxes in my room. When I was a teenager, they were in order, which I guess meant that the boxes were less random. I'd put the new comics away every week, after reading them. When I made an occasional order of back issues, I'd do the same. It was rather uncharacteristic, as I was not an orderly or organized teen. But there it was. In no way were comics ever considered disposable. They were a sort of book, after all, and you don't get rid of books, you get more of them.

When I was in college, I learned about longboxes. My comic-buying became more erratic, but I seem to have a steady run of most books for that time period despite being 1000 miles from home at the time. I suspect my brother picked them up for me, although I honestly don't remember. And when I came home on break, I'd read them and I'd put them away. This time in the longboxes, with dividers between titles. Even tried bagging them for a while (although never boarding) but that didn't last long because it takes too long to take the book out of the bag to read it. (Patience is not one of my notable virtues. What did I do before the microwave ovens...wait, I know. I didn't cook.) It wasn't foolproof--somehow I managed to store my entire run of Invaders somewhere where I haven't been able to find it in years--but on the whole I know where things are.

At some point I gave up comics--some point in the 90s. I suspect a lot of folks gave up comics in the 90s. That just meant I didn't buy any new ones. I still had my longboxes on the back porch, and the occasional box in the basement.

And a few years ago I took them up again. About a year after that--a year with piles of comics balancing precariously on end tables--I ordered some shortboxes (is that what you call the shorter comic boxes?). The short ones because now the kids were reading comics as well, and I thought the longboxes would be too hard for a kid to manage. The shortboxes, they do fine with. So we have shortboxes now, and no good place to put them. That's when I do put them away. I still tend to have stacks in likely spots ("likely" = "I might want to sit here and read comics"). The stacks tip over, I pick them up and/or move them, and the cycle continues.

I'm considering getting longboxes again, because the short ones are starting to pile up, and while they do take up less horizontal space, when you stack them, they do eat into the vertical space. And they tend to tip over. However, there's a real plus to the shorter boxes: whereas the longboxes need to be kept somewhere where people won't trip on them, you can pick up a shortbox and put it next to your comfy chair to read at your leisure withough someone complaining that they can't get to the printer. So...maybe not.

Thing is, I know there's got to be a solution to this. Plenty of people, here on the internet and elsewhere, buy many more comics than I do, and they have to put them somewhere. I just need to figure it out.